Two Evenings of Performance - Hearing the Unheard: Music by Mazzoli, the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, Coleridge-Taylor, and Lili Boulanger; Joys of Spring: Music by Paris-Carter, Bach, and Dvorak

The program of my first senior concert formed almost accidentally, yet a common and important thread quickly emerged. Few, if any, of the names or the pieces on the program have entered into the canon of classical music. With compositions by Missy Mazzoli, the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, and Lili Boulanger, I was able to introduce an audience to people who are not the status quo dead cishet (cisgender, heterosexual) white male composer. The performance of the music of such artists was inspired by an urgency that I felt since arriving at Bard, and that became an international necessity during the 2020 covid lockdown. This has been reflected in many aspects of my academic and musical life at Bard, from taking a course on gender and sexuality in Italian opera, to helping to form a concert of Baroque music by women composers. While the impulses behind this concert may seem progressive, from the moment I had any ideas about a potential music senior project, I really wanted one of my performances to be a standard, conservative violin recital, wearing fancy clothes and performing with an accompanist. I achieved that, and was quite proud of how it went. Especially after performances, I tend to be displeased with how I sounded and fixate on the negative aspects of my playing. Luckily, this performance was one of very few that I felt really happy with, perhaps due to a large, supportive audience, or because of the interesting and unique repertoire on the program. For my second senior concert, I wanted to find a way to combine all aspects of my undergraduate music studies; specifically, violin performance, conducting, Baroque performance, and the necessity to showcase works by such composers. Working with James Bagwell, I learned Dvorak’s Wind Serenade, Op. 44, and working with Erica Kiesewetter, Renée Louprette, and Marka Gustavsson, I prepared J.S. Bach’s E Major Violin Concerto, BWV 1042. Both of these pieces, however, utilized completely separate musical forces—one solely strings, and one solely winds, plus a cello and a bass—so I wanted to find a piece that somehow combined all the moving parts. We were privileged to premiere Reef (Bird’s Eye) by Sasha Paris-Carter, who currently studies composition at Oberlin Conservatory. They graciously arranged and rewrote the piece for the forces that I had, and added a solo violin part that I could lead the orchestra from. Through three intense months of outreach, I was able to recruit seventeen really wonderful musicians to perform with me. Every corner of the College was represented, from Conservatory students, to fellow music seniors, to community members, to graduate students. This concert would not have been successful without their generous time and musicianship, and I am very grateful to all of them. Logistically, this was a huge concert to accomplish, especially in terms of recruitment, and scheduling rehearsals and spaces. I was also out for a few days with covid the week before the concert. However, I think it was very successful, and I look forward to organizing and forming more orchestras to work with in the future

Keeping up with Innovation: Designing a European Sandbox for Fintech. CEPS ECMI Commentary no 58 | January 2019

In the aftermath of the 2007-09 global financial crisis, regulators in all major jurisdictions introduced significant new requirements for financial firms. Certainly justified in purpose, these regulations have increased market barriers, both directly through specific obligations, and indirectly through the sheer magnitude and complexity they involve. Regulators primarily focused on bolstering financial stability and consumer protection, while frequently disregarding their objective of promoting financial innovation. Ten years after the crisis, we believe that it is time to reconsider the appropriate balance between those objectives. In this commentary, we show how EU financial regulation may stifle the innovation of financial services. We use the example of automated investment advice, so-called ‘robo-advisors’, and we show how a proper balance between regulatory objectives could be achieved through establishing a ‘guided’ regulatory sandbox

Eliciting pension beneficiaries’ sustainability preferences:Netspar Design Paper 207

Pension funds are under social and political pressure to make their investment policies more sustainable. Furthermore, European legislation will increasingly require pension funds to explicitly measure participants’ preferences for sustainability in their investment policies. However, do pension fund participants prefer sustainable investments and do they want a say in how the fund does that? We assessed this by conducting two field experiments in which a Dutch pension fund gave its participants a real voice in its policy to advance sustainable investment

A comparison of reimbursement recommendations by European HTA agencies : Is there opportunity for further alignment?

Introduction: In Europe and beyond, the rising costs of healthcare and limited healthcare resources have resulted in the implementation of health technology assessment (HTA) to inform health policy and reimbursement decision-making. European legislation has provided a harmonized route for the regulatory process with the European Medicines Agency, but reimbursement decision-making still remains the responsibility of each country. There is a recognized need to move toward a more objective and collaborative reimbursement environment for new medicines in Europe. Therefore, the aim of this study was to objectively assess and compare the national reimbursement recommendations of 9 European jurisdictions following European Medicines Agency (EMA) recommendation for centralized marketing authorization. Methods: Using publicly available data and newly developed classification tools, this study appraised 9 European reimbursement systems by assessing HTA processes and the relationship between the regulatory, HTA and decision-making organizations. Each national HTA agency was classified according to two novel taxonomies. The System taxonomy, focuses on the position of the HTA agency within the national reimbursement system according to the relationship between the regulator, the HTA-performing agency, and the reimbursement decision-making coverage body. The HTA Process taxonomy distinguishes between the individual HTA agency's approach to economic and therapeutic evaluation and the inclusion of an independent appraisal step. The taxonomic groups were subsequently compared with national HTA recommendations. Results: This study identified European national reimbursement recommendations for 102 new active substances (NASs) approved by the EMA from 2008 to 2012. These reimbursement recommendations were compared using a novel classification tool and identified alignment between the organizational structure of reimbursement systems (System taxonomy) and HTA recommendations. However, there was less alignment between the HTA processes and recommendations. Conclusions: In order to move forward to a more harmonized HTA environment within Europe, it is first necessary to understand the variation in HTA practices within Europe. This study has identified alignment between HTA recommendations and the System taxonomy and one of the major implications of this study is that such alignment could support a more collaborative HTA environment in Europe.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio